DUANE
Duane's take
The way the official marker tells it, here's what happened out near Old Tarrant, Hopkins County, Texas. Now picture this. The Civil War is tearing the South apart, and families by the hundreds are loading up whatever they can carry and heading west — toward Texas, toward something that felt a little more like safety.
Federal invasion threatened, sure, but only a few coastal towns were actually under fire from the enemy. Compared to what was happening back home? Texas looked like solid ground.
One of those families was Mrs. Amanda Stone's, out of Louisiana. The Stones were making their way through Hopkins County, in the vicinity of Old Tarrant, south of where this marker stands, when a road accident stopped them cold.
And here's where the story turns — because the folks of Hopkins County didn't look the other way. They came out to help. They shared what little they had.
And when I say little, I mean little. These Texans cooked the last tough old farm hen they had to feed the Stone family. The last one.
That kind of generosity has a way of sticking in a person's memory. The Stones weren't alone in making that trek. Gen.
Kirby Smith, with his headquarters over in Shreveport, rented homes in Marshall or Hempstead to shelter his wife and babies from the worst of it. The family of Gen. Stand Watie came in from Indian Territory and visited relatives over in Wood County.
Refugees arriving from every direction, each one carrying their own weight of grief and uncertainty. And the Stones carried plenty. They had lost their old home to the enemy back in Louisiana, and that wound didn't heal just because they'd crossed a state line.
In Texas, they endured poverty, loneliness, and the sorrow of losing two sons in the war. Two sons. They had to lease farm land just to keep the household going — a household that included ninety slaves dependent upon them for their keep.
Their young boys, at one point, carried pistols to school, because their strange manners had made them targets among the local schoolchildren. That's a hard kind of welcome. But here's the thing — and this is what the marker wants you to sit with.
Eventually, the Stones and most of the other refugees came around to something like gratitude. Texas, for all its hardships, had shown them generosity they hadn't forgotten. A tough old hen.
A hand offered on a dirt road south of Old Tarrant. Sometimes that's enough to tip the scales. Out here on the Texas road, the land remembers even when the houses are gone.
What the marker says
In the vicinity of Old Tarrant, south of here, the Civil War refugee family of Mrs. Amanda Stone, of Louisiana, was shown great kindness when rescued by Hopkins countians after a road accident. The Stones saw the Texans share the little they had, even cooking the last tough old farm hen, to feed them. The Stones were but one of many families to flee from war lines to the comparative safety of Texas. Here, though Federal invasion repeatedly threatened, only a few coastal towns were under fire from the enemy. The family of Gen. Stand Watie, from Indian Territory, visited relatives in Wood County. Gen. Kirby Smith, with headquarters in Shreveport, rented homes in Marshall or Hempstead for his wife and babies. Like most refugees, the Stones when they visited in Hopkins County were heartbroken over loss of their old home to the enemy. In Texas they endured poverty, loneliness, and sorrow at deaths of two sons in the war. They had to lease farm land, to support the family and 90 slaves dependent upon them. Their young boys at one time carried pistols for safety when schoolmates resented their strange manners. Yet eventually they and most other refugees were grateful to Texas for its many generosities.